{1} See Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge, trans. Arnold Rosin (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962).
{2} Case reported by William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Henry Holt and Co., 1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 266. Case was commented on by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Company, 1953), I.342.
{3} John Eccles, The Human Mystery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 138.
{4} See especially Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
{5} F. Patterson, "Conversations with a Gorilla," National Geographic (October 1978); Herbert Terrace, "Can an Ape Create a Sentence," Science (November 23, 1979); idem, Nim (Knopf, 1979); Thomas and Donna Sebeok, ed., Speaking of Apes (Plenum, 1980).
{6} John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin (New York: Avon, 1967).
{7} The Turing test is a criterion proposed by Alan Turing for determining whether a computer is as 'intelligent' as a human being. It consists of isolating both a person and a computer to be tested from the person doing the testing. All communication is to be done through a keyboard. The computer will have passed the test if the tester cannot distinguish the computer from the person being tested through this mode of communication. Mortimer Adler, an Aristotelian and a Thomist, in his The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971), apparently accepts this criterion.
{8} This was argued by J.R. Lucas in his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," Philosophy (1961): 112-127. The paper provoked a slew of polemical responses, including that of Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
{9} Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
{10} The very title of the article by B.C. Thurston, "On Sellars' Linguistic Account of Awareness," Synthese 66 (1986), expresses this claim. Thurston claims that "Sellars offers an elaborate theory to the effect that all awareness is linguistic" (p. 384).
Roderick Chisholm (in his correspondence with Sellars, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), defended the position that the intentionality of language can be explained only by positing independently existing thoughts (as if Sellars denied this).
Hector-Neri Castañeda (in his correspondence with Sellars) argued that Sellars could not do justice to introspective knowledge without presupposing non-linguistic thoughts.
Ausonio Marras, in several papers: "On Sellars' Linguistic Theory of Conceptual Activity," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Reply to Sellars," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Sellars on Thought and Language," Noûs 7 (1973); "Sellars' Behaviorism: A Reply to Fred Wilson," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976); "Rules, Meaning and Behavior: Reflections on Sellars' Philosophy of Language," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, ed. by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), argued that Sellars' account of thoughts was flawed by either an infinite regress or circularity. His alternative was to posit the existence of non-linguistic thoughts prior to language, concluding in one of these papers, "we have probably moved irremediably away from Sellars in countenancing pre-linguistic, symbolic or conceptual abilities." Marras, "Rules," 183.
Romane Clark argued in several papers: "Sensuous Judgments," Noûs 7 (1973); "The Sensuous Content of Perception," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, ed. H.N. Castañeda (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1975); "Sensibility and Understanding: The Given of Wilfrid Sellars," The Monist 65 (1982), that the range of our thoughts extends beyond our linguistic resources to express. Inspired by the philosophy of Everett Hall, he follows up his criticism of Sellars with a theory of "sensuous judgments" constituting a language of thought and perception.
Thomas Russman writes: "Sellars denies that there can be pre-conceptual awareness of anything," in "The Problem of the Two Images," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, edited by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), 92). He repeats this charge in his A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987): "Sellars assumes throughout this attack [on the given] that there is no such thing as non-conceptual (or preconceptual) perceptual awareness. (p. 8)"
Robert Ackermann comes up with the following conclusion: "It would then seem that the Jones myth underlying the internalization of speech as giving rise to thought would not be compatible with the scientific image," in "Sellars and the Scientific Image," Noûs 7 (1973), 148.
{11} Nelson Goodman, "The Emperor's New Ideas," in Language and Philosophy, ed. S. Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1969); reprinted in N. Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972), 77.
{12} Addis, L., "Natural Signs," Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983): 543-568.
{13} J.A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
{14} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{15} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1963), 160. This same passage is cited by R. Rorty as evidence for the claim that Sellars denies the existence of a pre-linguistic awareness. See his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xx. However, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182-192, Rorty notes a distinction between "awareness-as-discriminative-behavior" and "awareness as what Sellars calls being 'in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says' (p. 182)." He correctly notes that in the Sellarsian passage only the latter type of awareness is denied to pre-linguistic creatures.
{16} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 303. Since Thurston cites both (and only) Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "The Structure of Knowledge" for her interpretation, it is puzzling why she doesn't try to reconcile her interpretation with this seeming counterexample. There are also the following types of clarifying passages in Sellars:
For if one ties thinking too closely to language, the acquisition of linguistic skills by children becomes puzzling in ways which generate talk about 'innate grammatical theories'. Not all 'organized behavior' is built on linguistic structures. The most that can be claimed is that what might be called 'conceptual thinking' is essentially tied to language, and that, for obvious reasons, the central or core concept of what thinking is pertains to conceptual thinking. ( Ibid. )"
{17} Wilfrid Sellars, " Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 3-30; idem, " Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 325-345.
{19} Sellars, " Behavior,"p. 15.
{20} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336.
{22} Sellars, "Philosophy of Mind," p. 169.
{23} However, one commentator, William Rottschaefer, who had the benefit of reading Sellars' "Mental Events" and "Behavior, Language and Meaning," defended Sellars from Marras' accusation that Sellars denies the existence of pre-linguistic symbolic structures. See his "Verbal Behaviorism and Theoretical Mentalism," Philosophical Research Archives 9 (1983), 525.
{24} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior," in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook, (New York: The Dial Press, 1949), p. 301.
{25} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967), ch. 1 and appendix.
{26} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," Science, Perception and Reality, p. 334.
{27} Wilfrid Sellars, "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures," The Monist 64 (1981), 12.
{28} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304. {29} Charles Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
{30} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 335, #55.
{31} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 120.
{32} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336, #59. In "Truth and 'Correspondence'," he credits Hume with calling them 'natural inferences'. 218.
{34} Wilfrid Sellars, "Naming and Saying," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 226; also idem, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas, Publishers, 1967), 78.
{35} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 339.
{38} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," in Science, Perception, and Reality.
{39} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 81; idem, "Meaning as Functional Classification," Synthese 27 (1974), pp. 423-4. [William Rapaport in a critical review of John Searles' Minds, Brains and Science, Noûs 22 (1988) calls an association between symbols and external objects an "external semantics"; while an association between symbols he calls "internal semantics" , 597. (AC 1996)]
{40} Ibid., 420. [The implication of this position is that beliefs are things one suffers, rather than things willed. If ethics is primarily concerned with prescribing which actions should be performed, then, in this primary concern, there cannot be an ethics of belief as propounded by R. Chisholm in his many writings. See R. Firth, "Chishom and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Review 68 (1959): pp. 493-506, and William P. Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 115-152. This does not preclude talk about an ethics of belief in some extended sense. The stress on acts rather than actions may be Sellars' inheritance from Husserl via Marvin Farber's influence, see footnote 1, ch.1. (AC 1996)]
{41} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 178. Sellars' view of volitions escapes Ryle's main criticism of "the myth of volitions." Ryle criticized a view of the will as an "action of the mind" , but clearly Sellars denies that willing is an action. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), ch. 3.
{42} Gilbert Harman, "Three Levels of Meaning," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 590-602.
{43} Sellars, "Meaning as Functional Classification," 417.
{44} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{46} Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," 15.
{49} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 355.
{50} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #87.
{51} Henri-Neri Castañeda, "Rejoinders," in Knowledge and Experience, ed. C.D. Rollins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 125.{52} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 330, #25.{53} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #89.
{54} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 319.
{55} Wilfrid Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?" Science, Perception, and Reality, 298.
{56} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," in Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975), 437.
{57} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 298.
{60} Sellars in his own way is in agreement with Quine's challenge to the analytic-synthetic distinction as expressed in the following footnote:
That the cluster of inference by virtue of which an expression refers to a red triangle as such (or a bachelor as such) are open-textured and variable, and need only have a family resemblance from context to context, is the truth contained in Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. My central concern over the years in stressing material rule of inference has been not to deny the point Quine is making -- indeed, to a behavioristically oriented anti-Platonist, the denial would be foolish -- but rather to insist that inference patterns other than those formulated by logical truths are essential to meaning and reference. That these extra-logical inference patterns do not neatly divide into 'explicit' and 'implicit' definitions, and that they trail off into contingent generalizations, are theses that have emotional charge only for those who are still fighting the battle of the Museum. [Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), #31, 309.]
Now, in view of this analysis, I think that R. Rorty is wrong in attributing to Sellars an adherence to a kind of analytic-synthetic distinction which was criticized by Quine. And if my contention is true, then Rorty's basic premise of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that Sellars and Quine have not assimilated each other's insights collapses, at least in Sellars' case. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 171.
{61} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 176.
{64} Ibid., 200. Cf. W. Sellars, "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ...," Proceedings of the APA, 44 (1972), #71-#88.
{65} Wilfrid Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980), p. 94, #129.
{66} Hector-Neri Castañeda, "Some Reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of Intentions," in Action, Knowledge and Reality : 27-54. Bruce Aune, "Sellars on Practical Reason," in Action, Knowledge and Reality: 1-26. W. D. Solomon, "Ethical Theory," in The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Delaney, C.F., et alia, (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977): 149-188.
{68} Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," 83.
{69} Sellars, "Language Games," p. 330, #26.
{70} Rudolph Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), 180.
{72} Wilfrid Sellars, "A Semantic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," Methodos 5 (1953), 53.
{73} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 289.
{74} Ibid., 312; see also idem, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and 10 Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{75} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 317.
{76} Wilfrid Sellars, "Reply [to criticism of " Meaning as Functional Classification"]," Synthese 27 (1974), 457.
{77} Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 182.
{78} Leibniz, "Monadology," in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), #26; Wilfrid Sellars, "Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981), 342.
{79} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-1969): 506-27. Reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History, 96.
I am simplifying the matter by failing to distinguish as does Sellars between categorical and hypothetical rules; and between 'rules of ought-to-do' (rules of action) and 'rules of ought-to-be' (rules of criticism). But this is irrelevant to the present discussion.
{80} Wilfrid Sellars, "Phenomenalism," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 334.
{81} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342.
{84} Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Disposi- tions, and the Causal Modalities," 272.
{85} Arthur Burks, , "The Logic of Causal Propositions," Mind 60 (1951), 272.
{86} See Wilfrid Sellars, "On the Logic of Complex Particulars," Mind 58 (1949), pp. 317-318.
{87} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 317.
{88} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 115. [It should be noted that Frege's monumental Bergiffsschrift, or Concept Writing (as it could be translated) was intended to capture those contents and structures of language which were relevant to inference. He writes: ". . . in a judgment I consider only that which influences its possible consequences. Everything necessary for a correct inference is expressed in full . . ." in Jean van Heijenoort, ed. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book In Mathematical Logic, 1979-1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12. (AC 1996)]
{89} D. Krech and R.S. Crutchfield, Elements of Psychology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 464.
{90} John B. Carroll, Language and Thought (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 81.
{92} Peter Geach, Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 17.
{93} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," in Philosophical Perspectives, 207.
{94} Roderick Chisholm, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," 533. [William Ockham has a similar view in identifying a concept with an intention of the soul. (AC 1996)]
{96} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{97} Wilfrid Sellars, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives, 78.
{98} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{99} Wilfrid Sellars, "Conceptual Change," in Essays in Philosophy and its History, p. 176.
{102} Sellars, "The Language of Theories," 115.
{104} William S. Robinson, "The Legend of the Given," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, 89.
{106} Wilfrid Sellars, "Epistemology and the New Way of Words," The Journal of Philosophy 44 (1947), 655.
{107} See Wilfrid Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{108} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 296.
{109} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 129.
{110} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 119-120.
{111} Wilfrid Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980), #126. The analysis of the determinable (sortal, generic) as a disjuction of determinables and determinates (the language of determinables and determinates is borrowed by Sellars from chapter 11 of W. E. Johnson's Logic: Part I (Cambridge University Press, 1921; Dover, 1964). The thesis is present, I believe, in the earliest writings of Sellars.
{111a} [Sellars also claims that failure to make this distinction accounts for Locke's and Berkeley's confusions about generic concepts:
As I see it, the, one element involved in the mass of confusions that is the Berkeleian theory of ideas is the confusion between an awareness of a disjunction and a disjunction of awareness . . . (Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 301f)One only needs to take into account the fact that 'and' and 'or' are interchangeable in certain ordinary contexts to understand the confusion involved in Locke's unhappy (but diagnostic) reference to ". . . the general idea of a triangle . . . [which] must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once" ( Essay, IV, 7, 9). ( Ibid., 311) (AC 1996)]
{111b} [I think my analysis provides the key to understanding this chapter which otherwise is very obscure. I agree with Gilbert Harman's opening remarks in his review of Sellars' Science and Metaphysics :
Science and Metaphysics is a major work which deserves to be, and will be, read and reread. It is also a difficult work, particularly so in its opening chapters. The reader may wish to begin with Chapter III, saving Chapters I and II for last."(" Sellars' Semantics," Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 404.)(AC 1996)]
{112} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 132.
{113} L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
{114} This is probably what R. Rorty wanted to hear when he introduced the Carus lectures of Sellars by expressing an anticipation of a Hegelian synthesis.
{115} H. Brown, "Sellars, Concepts and Conceptual Change," Synthese 68 (1986), 291.
{1} See Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge, trans. Arnold Rosin (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962).
{2} Case reported by William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Henry Holt and Co., 1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 266. Case was commented on by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Company, 1953), I.342.
{3} John Eccles, The Human Mystery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 138.
{4} See especially Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
{5} F. Patterson, "Conversations with a Gorilla," National Geographic (October 1978); Herbert Terrace, "Can an Ape Create a Sentence," Science (November 23, 1979); idem, Nim (Knopf, 1979); Thomas and Donna Sebeok, ed., Speaking of Apes (Plenum, 1980).
{6} John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin (New York: Avon, 1967).
{7} The Turing test is a criterion proposed by Alan Turing for determining whether a computer is as 'intelligent' as a human being. It consists of isolating both a person and a computer to be tested from the person doing the testing. All communication is to be done through a keyboard. The computer will have passed the test if the tester cannot distinguish the computer from the person being tested through this mode of communication. Mortimer Adler, an Aristotelian and a Thomist, in his The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971), apparently accepts this criterion.
{8} This was argued by J.R. Lucas in his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," Philosophy (1961): 112-127. The paper provoked a slew of polemical responses, including that of Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
{9} Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
{10} The very title of the article by B.C. Thurston, "On Sellars' Linguistic Account of Awareness," Synthese 66 (1986), expresses this claim. Thurston claims that "Sellars offers an elaborate theory to the effect that all awareness is linguistic" (p. 384).
Roderick Chisholm (in his correspondence with Sellars, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), defended the position that the intentionality of language can be explained only by positing independently existing thoughts (as if Sellars denied this).
Hector-Neri Castañeda (in his correspondence with Sellars) argued that Sellars could not do justice to introspective knowledge without presupposing non-linguistic thoughts.
Ausonio Marras, in several papers: "On Sellars' Linguistic Theory of Conceptual Activity," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Reply to Sellars," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Sellars on Thought and Language," Noûs 7 (1973); "Sellars' Behaviorism: A Reply to Fred Wilson," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976); "Rules, Meaning and Behavior: Reflections on Sellars' Philosophy of Language," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, ed. by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), argued that Sellars' account of thoughts was flawed by either an infinite regress or circularity. His alternative was to posit the existence of non-linguistic thoughts prior to language, concluding in one of these papers, "we have probably moved irremediably away from Sellars in countenancing pre-linguistic, symbolic or conceptual abilities." Marras, "Rules," 183.
Romane Clark argued in several papers: "Sensuous Judgments," Noûs 7 (1973); "The Sensuous Content of Perception," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, ed. H.N. Castañeda (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1975); "Sensibility and Understanding: The Given of Wilfrid Sellars," The Monist 65 (1982), that the range of our thoughts extends beyond our linguistic resources to express. Inspired by the philosophy of Everett Hall, he follows up his criticism of Sellars with a theory of "sensuous judgments" constituting a language of thought and perception.
Thomas Russman writes: "Sellars denies that there can be pre-conceptual awareness of anything," in "The Problem of the Two Images," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, edited by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), 92). He repeats this charge in his A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987): "Sellars assumes throughout this attack [on the given] that there is no such thing as non-conceptual (or preconceptual) perceptual awareness. (p. 8)"
Robert Ackermann comes up with the following conclusion: "It would then seem that the Jones myth underlying the internalization of speech as giving rise to thought would not be compatible with the scientific image," in "Sellars and the Scientific Image," Noûs 7 (1973), 148.
{11} Nelson Goodman, "The Emperor's New Ideas," in Language and Philosophy, ed. S. Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1969); reprinted in N. Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972), 77.
{12} Addis, L., "Natural Signs," Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983): 543-568.
{13} J.A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
{14} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{15} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1963), 160. This same passage is cited by R. Rorty as evidence for the claim that Sellars denies the existence of a pre-linguistic awareness. See his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xx. However, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182-192, Rorty notes a distinction between "awareness-as-discriminative-behavior" and "awareness as what Sellars calls being 'in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says' (p. 182)." He correctly notes that in the Sellarsian passage only the latter type of awareness is denied to pre-linguistic creatures.
{16} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 303. Since Thurston cites both (and only) Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "The Structure of Knowledge" for her interpretation, it is puzzling why she doesn't try to reconcile her interpretation with this seeming counterexample. There are also the following types of clarifying passages in Sellars:
For if one ties thinking too closely to language, the acquisition of linguistic skills by children becomes puzzling in ways which generate talk about 'innate grammatical theories'. Not all 'organized behavior' is built on linguistic structures. The most that can be claimed is that what might be called 'conceptual thinking' is essentially tied to language, and that, for obvious reasons, the central or core concept of what thinking is pertains to conceptual thinking. ( Ibid. )"
{17} Wilfrid Sellars, " Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 3-30; idem, " Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 325-345.
{19} Sellars, " Behavior,"p. 15.
{20} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336.
{22} Sellars, "Philosophy of Mind," p. 169.
{23} However, one commentator, William Rottschaefer, who had the benefit of reading Sellars' "Mental Events" and "Behavior, Language and Meaning," defended Sellars from Marras' accusation that Sellars denies the existence of pre-linguistic symbolic structures. See his "Verbal Behaviorism and Theoretical Mentalism," Philosophical Research Archives 9 (1983), 525.
{24} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior," in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook, (New York: The Dial Press, 1949), p. 301.
{25} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967), ch. 1 and appendix.
{26} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," Science, Perception and Reality, p. 334.
{27} Wilfrid Sellars, "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures," The Monist 64 (1981), 12.
{28} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304. {29} Charles Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
{30} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 335, #55.
{31} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 120.
{32} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336, #59. In "Truth and 'Correspondence'," he credits Hume with calling them 'natural inferences'. 218.
{34} Wilfrid Sellars, "Naming and Saying," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 226; also idem, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas, Publishers, 1967), 78.
{35} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 339.
{38} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," in Science, Perception, and Reality.
{39} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 81; idem, "Meaning as Functional Classification," Synthese 27 (1974), pp. 423-4. [William Rapaport in a critical review of John Searles' Minds, Brains and Science, Noûs 22 (1988) calls an association between symbols and external objects an "external semantics"; while an association between symbols he calls "internal semantics" , 597. (AC 1996)]
{40} Ibid., 420. [The implication of this position is that beliefs are things one suffers, rather than things willed. If ethics is primarily concerned with prescribing which actions should be performed, then, in this primary concern, there cannot be an ethics of belief as propounded by R. Chisholm in his many writings. See R. Firth, "Chishom and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Review 68 (1959): pp. 493-506, and William P. Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 115-152. This does not preclude talk about an ethics of belief in some extended sense. The stress on acts rather than actions may be Sellars' inheritance from Husserl via Marvin Farber's influence, see footnote 1, ch.1. (AC 1996)]
{41} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 178. Sellars' view of volitions escapes Ryle's main criticism of "the myth of volitions." Ryle criticized a view of the will as an "action of the mind" , but clearly Sellars denies that willing is an action. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), ch. 3.
{42} Gilbert Harman, "Three Levels of Meaning," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 590-602.
{43} Sellars, "Meaning as Functional Classification," 417.
{44} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{46} Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," 15.
{49} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 355.
{50} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #87.
{51} Henri-Neri Castañeda, "Rejoinders," in Knowledge and Experience, ed. C.D. Rollins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 125.{52} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 330, #25.{53} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #89.
{54} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 319.
{55} Wilfrid Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?" Science, Perception, and Reality, 298.
{56} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," in Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975), 437.
{57} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 298.
{60} Sellars in his own way is in agreement with Quine's challenge to the analytic-synthetic distinction as expressed in the following footnote:
That the cluster of inference by virtue of which an expression refers to a red triangle as such (or a bachelor as such) are open-textured and variable, and need only have a family resemblance from context to context, is the truth contained in Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. My central concern over the years in stressing material rule of inference has been not to deny the point Quine is making -- indeed, to a behavioristically oriented anti-Platonist, the denial would be foolish -- but rather to insist that inference patterns other than those formulated by logical truths are essential to meaning and reference. That these extra-logical inference patterns do not neatly divide into 'explicit' and 'implicit' definitions, and that they trail off into contingent generalizations, are theses that have emotional charge only for those who are still fighting the battle of the Museum. [Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), #31, 309.]
Now, in view of this analysis, I think that R. Rorty is wrong in attributing to Sellars an adherence to a kind of analytic-synthetic distinction which was criticized by Quine. And if my contention is true, then Rorty's basic premise of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that Sellars and Quine have not assimilated each other's insights collapses, at least in Sellars' case. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 171.
{61} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 176.
{64} Ibid., 200. Cf. W. Sellars, "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ...," Proceedings of the APA, 44 (1972), #71-#88.
{65} Wilfrid Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980), p. 94, #129.
{66} Hector-Neri Castañeda, "Some Reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of Intentions," in Action, Knowledge and Reality : 27-54. Bruce Aune, "Sellars on Practical Reason," in Action, Knowledge and Reality: 1-26. W. D. Solomon, "Ethical Theory," in The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Delaney, C.F., et alia, (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977): 149-188.
{68} Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," 83.
{69} Sellars, "Language Games," p. 330, #26.
{70} Rudolph Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), 180.
{72} Wilfrid Sellars, "A Semantic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," Methodos 5 (1953), 53.
{73} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 289.
{74} Ibid., 312; see also idem, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and 10 Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{75} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 317.
{76} Wilfrid Sellars, "Reply [to criticism of " Meaning as Functional Classification"]," Synthese 27 (1974), 457.
{77} Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 182.
{78} Leibniz, "Monadology," in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), #26; Wilfrid Sellars, "Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981), 342.
{79} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-1969): 506-27. Reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History, 96.
I am simplifying the matter by failing to distinguish as does Sellars between categorical and hypothetical rules; and between 'rules of ought-to-do' (rules of action) and 'rules of ought-to-be' (rules of criticism). But this is irrelevant to the present discussion.
{80} Wilfrid Sellars, "Phenomenalism," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 334.
{81} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342.
{84} Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Disposi- tions, and the Causal Modalities," 272.
{85} Arthur Burks, , "The Logic of Causal Propositions," Mind 60 (1951), 272.
{86} See Wilfrid Sellars, "On the Logic of Complex Particulars," Mind 58 (1949), pp. 317-318.
{87} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 317.
{88} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 115. [It should be noted that Frege's monumental Bergiffsschrift, or Concept Writing (as it could be translated) was intended to capture those contents and structures of language which were relevant to inference. He writes: ". . . in a judgment I consider only that which influences its possible consequences. Everything necessary for a correct inference is expressed in full . . ." in Jean van Heijenoort, ed. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book In Mathematical Logic, 1979-1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12. (AC 1996)]
{89} D. Krech and R.S. Crutchfield, Elements of Psychology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 464.
{90} John B. Carroll, Language and Thought (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 81.
{92} Peter Geach, Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 17.
{93} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," in Philosophical Perspectives, 207.
{94} Roderick Chisholm, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," 533. [William Ockham has a similar view in identifying a concept with an intention of the soul. (AC 1996)]
{96} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{97} Wilfrid Sellars, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives, 78.
{98} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{99} Wilfrid Sellars, "Conceptual Change," in Essays in Philosophy and its History, p. 176.
{102} Sellars, "The Language of Theories," 115.
{104} William S. Robinson, "The Legend of the Given," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, 89.
{106} Wilfrid Sellars, "Epistemology and the New Way of Words," The Journal of Philosophy 44 (1947), 655.
{107} See Wilfrid Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{108} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 296.
{109} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 129.
{110} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 119-120.
{111} Wilfrid Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980), #126. The analysis of the determinable (sortal, generic) as a disjuction of determinables and determinates (the language of determinables and determinates is borrowed by Sellars from chapter 11 of W. E. Johnson's Logic: Part I (Cambridge University Press, 1921; Dover, 1964). The thesis is present, I believe, in the earliest writings of Sellars.
{111a} [Sellars also claims that failure to make this distinction accounts for Locke's and Berkeley's confusions about generic concepts:
As I see it, the, one element involved in the mass of confusions that is the Berkeleian theory of ideas is the confusion between an awareness of a disjunction and a disjunction of awareness . . . (Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 301f)One only needs to take into account the fact that 'and' and 'or' are interchangeable in certain ordinary contexts to understand the confusion involved in Locke's unhappy (but diagnostic) reference to ". . . the general idea of a triangle . . . [which] must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once" ( Essay, IV, 7, 9). ( Ibid., 311) (AC 1996)]
{111b} [I think my analysis provides the key to understanding this chapter which otherwise is very obscure. I agree with Gilbert Harman's opening remarks in his review of Sellars' Science and Metaphysics :
Science and Metaphysics is a major work which deserves to be, and will be, read and reread. It is also a difficult work, particularly so in its opening chapters. The reader may wish to begin with Chapter III, saving Chapters I and II for last."(" Sellars' Semantics," Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 404.)(AC 1996)]
{112} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 132.
{113} L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
{114} This is probably what R. Rorty wanted to hear when he introduced the Carus lectures of Sellars by expressing an anticipation of a Hegelian synthesis.
{115} H. Brown, "Sellars, Concepts and Conceptual Change," Synthese 68 (1986), 291.
{1} See Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge, trans. Arnold Rosin (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962).
{2} Case reported by William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Henry Holt and Co., 1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 266. Case was commented on by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Company, 1953), I.342.
{3} John Eccles, The Human Mystery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 138.
{4} See especially Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
{5} F. Patterson, "Conversations with a Gorilla," National Geographic (October 1978); Herbert Terrace, "Can an Ape Create a Sentence," Science (November 23, 1979); idem, Nim (Knopf, 1979); Thomas and Donna Sebeok, ed., Speaking of Apes (Plenum, 1980).
{6} John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin (New York: Avon, 1967).
{7} The Turing test is a criterion proposed by Alan Turing for determining whether a computer is as 'intelligent' as a human being. It consists of isolating both a person and a computer to be tested from the person doing the testing. All communication is to be done through a keyboard. The computer will have passed the test if the tester cannot distinguish the computer from the person being tested through this mode of communication. Mortimer Adler, an Aristotelian and a Thomist, in his The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971), apparently accepts this criterion.
{8} This was argued by J.R. Lucas in his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," Philosophy (1961): 112-127. The paper provoked a slew of polemical responses, including that of Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
{9} Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
{10} The very title of the article by B.C. Thurston, "On Sellars' Linguistic Account of Awareness," Synthese 66 (1986), expresses this claim. Thurston claims that "Sellars offers an elaborate theory to the effect that all awareness is linguistic" (p. 384).
Roderick Chisholm (in his correspondence with Sellars, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), defended the position that the intentionality of language can be explained only by positing independently existing thoughts (as if Sellars denied this).
Hector-Neri Castañeda (in his correspondence with Sellars) argued that Sellars could not do justice to introspective knowledge without presupposing non-linguistic thoughts.
Ausonio Marras, in several papers: "On Sellars' Linguistic Theory of Conceptual Activity," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Reply to Sellars," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Sellars on Thought and Language," Noûs 7 (1973); "Sellars' Behaviorism: A Reply to Fred Wilson," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976); "Rules, Meaning and Behavior: Reflections on Sellars' Philosophy of Language," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, ed. by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), argued that Sellars' account of thoughts was flawed by either an infinite regress or circularity. His alternative was to posit the existence of non-linguistic thoughts prior to language, concluding in one of these papers, "we have probably moved irremediably away from Sellars in countenancing pre-linguistic, symbolic or conceptual abilities." Marras, "Rules," 183.
Romane Clark argued in several papers: "Sensuous Judgments," Noûs 7 (1973); "The Sensuous Content of Perception," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, ed. H.N. Castañeda (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1975); "Sensibility and Understanding: The Given of Wilfrid Sellars," The Monist 65 (1982), that the range of our thoughts extends beyond our linguistic resources to express. Inspired by the philosophy of Everett Hall, he follows up his criticism of Sellars with a theory of "sensuous judgments" constituting a language of thought and perception.
Thomas Russman writes: "Sellars denies that there can be pre-conceptual awareness of anything," in "The Problem of the Two Images," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, edited by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), 92). He repeats this charge in his A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987): "Sellars assumes throughout this attack [on the given] that there is no such thing as non-conceptual (or preconceptual) perceptual awareness. (p. 8)"
Robert Ackermann comes up with the following conclusion: "It would then seem that the Jones myth underlying the internalization of speech as giving rise to thought would not be compatible with the scientific image," in "Sellars and the Scientific Image," Noûs 7 (1973), 148.
{11} Nelson Goodman, "The Emperor's New Ideas," in Language and Philosophy, ed. S. Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1969); reprinted in N. Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972), 77.
{12} Addis, L., "Natural Signs," Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983): 543-568.
{13} J.A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
{14} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{15} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1963), 160. This same passage is cited by R. Rorty as evidence for the claim that Sellars denies the existence of a pre-linguistic awareness. See his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xx. However, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182-192, Rorty notes a distinction between "awareness-as-discriminative-behavior" and "awareness as what Sellars calls being 'in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says' (p. 182)." He correctly notes that in the Sellarsian passage only the latter type of awareness is denied to pre-linguistic creatures.
{16} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 303. Since Thurston cites both (and only) Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "The Structure of Knowledge" for her interpretation, it is puzzling why she doesn't try to reconcile her interpretation with this seeming counterexample. There are also the following types of clarifying passages in Sellars:
For if one ties thinking too closely to language, the acquisition of linguistic skills by children becomes puzzling in ways which generate talk about 'innate grammatical theories'. Not all 'organized behavior' is built on linguistic structures. The most that can be claimed is that what might be called 'conceptual thinking' is essentially tied to language, and that, for obvious reasons, the central or core concept of what thinking is pertains to conceptual thinking. ( Ibid. )"
{17} Wilfrid Sellars, " Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 3-30; idem, " Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 325-345.
{19} Sellars, " Behavior,"p. 15.
{20} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336.
{22} Sellars, "Philosophy of Mind," p. 169.
{23} However, one commentator, William Rottschaefer, who had the benefit of reading Sellars' "Mental Events" and "Behavior, Language and Meaning," defended Sellars from Marras' accusation that Sellars denies the existence of pre-linguistic symbolic structures. See his "Verbal Behaviorism and Theoretical Mentalism," Philosophical Research Archives 9 (1983), 525.
{24} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior," in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook, (New York: The Dial Press, 1949), p. 301.
{25} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967), ch. 1 and appendix.
{26} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," Science, Perception and Reality, p. 334.
{27} Wilfrid Sellars, "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures," The Monist 64 (1981), 12.
{28} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304. {29} Charles Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
{30} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 335, #55.
{31} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 120.
{32} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336, #59. In "Truth and 'Correspondence'," he credits Hume with calling them 'natural inferences'. 218.
{34} Wilfrid Sellars, "Naming and Saying," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 226; also idem, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas, Publishers, 1967), 78.
{35} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 339.
{38} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," in Science, Perception, and Reality.
{39} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 81; idem, "Meaning as Functional Classification," Synthese 27 (1974), pp. 423-4. [William Rapaport in a critical review of John Searles' Minds, Brains and Science, Noûs 22 (1988) calls an association between symbols and external objects an "external semantics"; while an association between symbols he calls "internal semantics" , 597. (AC 1996)]
{40} Ibid., 420. [The implication of this position is that beliefs are things one suffers, rather than things willed. If ethics is primarily concerned with prescribing which actions should be performed, then, in this primary concern, there cannot be an ethics of belief as propounded by R. Chisholm in his many writings. See R. Firth, "Chishom and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Review 68 (1959): pp. 493-506, and William P. Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 115-152. This does not preclude talk about an ethics of belief in some extended sense. The stress on acts rather than actions may be Sellars' inheritance from Husserl via Marvin Farber's influence, see footnote 1, ch.1. (AC 1996)]
{41} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 178. Sellars' view of volitions escapes Ryle's main criticism of "the myth of volitions." Ryle criticized a view of the will as an "action of the mind" , but clearly Sellars denies that willing is an action. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), ch. 3.
{42} Gilbert Harman, "Three Levels of Meaning," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 590-602.
{43} Sellars, "Meaning as Functional Classification," 417.
{44} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{46} Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," 15.
{49} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 355.
{50} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #87.
{51} Henri-Neri Castañeda, "Rejoinders," in Knowledge and Experience, ed. C.D. Rollins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 125.{52} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 330, #25.{53} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #89.
{54} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 319.
{55} Wilfrid Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?" Science, Perception, and Reality, 298.
{56} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," in Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975), 437.
{57} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 298.
{60} Sellars in his own way is in agreement with Quine's challenge to the analytic-synthetic distinction as expressed in the following footnote:
That the cluster of inference by virtue of which an expression refers to a red triangle as such (or a bachelor as such) are open-textured and variable, and need only have a family resemblance from context to context, is the truth contained in Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. My central concern over the years in stressing material rule of inference has been not to deny the point Quine is making -- indeed, to a behavioristically oriented anti-Platonist, the denial would be foolish -- but rather to insist that inference patterns other than those formulated by logical truths are essential to meaning and reference. That these extra-logical inference patterns do not neatly divide into 'explicit' and 'implicit' definitions, and that they trail off into contingent generalizations, are theses that have emotional charge only for those who are still fighting the battle of the Museum. [Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), #31, 309.]
Now, in view of this analysis, I think that R. Rorty is wrong in attributing to Sellars an adherence to a kind of analytic-synthetic distinction which was criticized by Quine. And if my contention is true, then Rorty's basic premise of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that Sellars and Quine have not assimilated each other's insights collapses, at least in Sellars' case. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 171.
{61} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 176.
{64} Ibid., 200. Cf. W. Sellars, "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ...," Proceedings of the APA, 44 (1972), #71-#88.
{65} Wilfrid Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980), p. 94, #129.
{66} Hector-Neri Castañeda, "Some Reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of Intentions," in Action, Knowledge and Reality : 27-54. Bruce Aune, "Sellars on Practical Reason," in Action, Knowledge and Reality: 1-26. W. D. Solomon, "Ethical Theory," in The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Delaney, C.F., et alia, (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977): 149-188.
{68} Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," 83.
{69} Sellars, "Language Games," p. 330, #26.
{70} Rudolph Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), 180.
{72} Wilfrid Sellars, "A Semantic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," Methodos 5 (1953), 53.
{73} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 289.
{74} Ibid., 312; see also idem, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and 10 Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{75} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 317.
{76} Wilfrid Sellars, "Reply [to criticism of " Meaning as Functional Classification"]," Synthese 27 (1974), 457.
{77} Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 182.
{78} Leibniz, "Monadology," in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), #26; Wilfrid Sellars, "Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981), 342.
{79} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-1969): 506-27. Reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History, 96.
I am simplifying the matter by failing to distinguish as does Sellars between categorical and hypothetical rules; and between 'rules of ought-to-do' (rules of action) and 'rules of ought-to-be' (rules of criticism). But this is irrelevant to the present discussion.
{80} Wilfrid Sellars, "Phenomenalism," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 334.
{81} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342.
{84} Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Disposi- tions, and the Causal Modalities," 272.
{85} Arthur Burks, , "The Logic of Causal Propositions," Mind 60 (1951), 272.
{86} See Wilfrid Sellars, "On the Logic of Complex Particulars," Mind 58 (1949), pp. 317-318.
{87} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 317.
{88} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 115. [It should be noted that Frege's monumental Bergiffsschrift, or Concept Writing (as it could be translated) was intended to capture those contents and structures of language which were relevant to inference. He writes: ". . . in a judgment I consider only that which influences its possible consequences. Everything necessary for a correct inference is expressed in full . . ." in Jean van Heijenoort, ed. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book In Mathematical Logic, 1979-1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12. (AC 1996)]
{89} D. Krech and R.S. Crutchfield, Elements of Psychology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 464.
{90} John B. Carroll, Language and Thought (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 81.
{92} Peter Geach, Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 17.
{93} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," in Philosophical Perspectives, 207.
{94} Roderick Chisholm, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," 533. [William Ockham has a similar view in identifying a concept with an intention of the soul. (AC 1996)]
{96} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{97} Wilfrid Sellars, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives, 78.
{98} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{99} Wilfrid Sellars, "Conceptual Change," in Essays in Philosophy and its History, p. 176.
{102} Sellars, "The Language of Theories," 115.
{104} William S. Robinson, "The Legend of the Given," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, 89.
{106} Wilfrid Sellars, "Epistemology and the New Way of Words," The Journal of Philosophy 44 (1947), 655.
{107} See Wilfrid Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{108} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 296.
{109} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 129.
{110} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 119-120.
{111} Wilfrid Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980), #126. The analysis of the determinable (sortal, generic) as a disjuction of determinables and determinates (the language of determinables and determinates is borrowed by Sellars from chapter 11 of W. E. Johnson's Logic: Part I (Cambridge University Press, 1921; Dover, 1964). The thesis is present, I believe, in the earliest writings of Sellars.
{111a} [Sellars also claims that failure to make this distinction accounts for Locke's and Berkeley's confusions about generic concepts:
As I see it, the, one element involved in the mass of confusions that is the Berkeleian theory of ideas is the confusion between an awareness of a disjunction and a disjunction of awareness . . . (Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 301f)One only needs to take into account the fact that 'and' and 'or' are interchangeable in certain ordinary contexts to understand the confusion involved in Locke's unhappy (but diagnostic) reference to ". . . the general idea of a triangle . . . [which] must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once" ( Essay, IV, 7, 9). ( Ibid., 311) (AC 1996)]
{111b} [I think my analysis provides the key to understanding this chapter which otherwise is very obscure. I agree with Gilbert Harman's opening remarks in his review of Sellars' Science and Metaphysics :
Science and Metaphysics is a major work which deserves to be, and will be, read and reread. It is also a difficult work, particularly so in its opening chapters. The reader may wish to begin with Chapter III, saving Chapters I and II for last."(" Sellars' Semantics," Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 404.)(AC 1996)]
{112} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 132.
{113} L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
{114} This is probably what R. Rorty wanted to hear when he introduced the Carus lectures of Sellars by expressing an anticipation of a Hegelian synthesis.
{115} H. Brown, "Sellars, Concepts and Conceptual Change," Synthese 68 (1986), 291.
{1} See Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge, trans. Arnold Rosin (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962).
{2} Case reported by William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Henry Holt and Co., 1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 266. Case was commented on by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Company, 1953), I.342.
{3} John Eccles, The Human Mystery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 138.
{4} See especially Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
{5} F. Patterson, "Conversations with a Gorilla," National Geographic (October 1978); Herbert Terrace, "Can an Ape Create a Sentence," Science (November 23, 1979); idem, Nim (Knopf, 1979); Thomas and Donna Sebeok, ed., Speaking of Apes (Plenum, 1980).
{6} John C. Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin (New York: Avon, 1967).
{7} The Turing test is a criterion proposed by Alan Turing for determining whether a computer is as 'intelligent' as a human being. It consists of isolating both a person and a computer to be tested from the person doing the testing. All communication is to be done through a keyboard. The computer will have passed the test if the tester cannot distinguish the computer from the person being tested through this mode of communication. Mortimer Adler, an Aristotelian and a Thomist, in his The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971), apparently accepts this criterion.
{8} This was argued by J.R. Lucas in his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," Philosophy (1961): 112-127. The paper provoked a slew of polemical responses, including that of Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
{9} Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
{10} The very title of the article by B.C. Thurston, "On Sellars' Linguistic Account of Awareness," Synthese 66 (1986), expresses this claim. Thurston claims that "Sellars offers an elaborate theory to the effect that all awareness is linguistic" (p. 384).
Roderick Chisholm (in his correspondence with Sellars, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), defended the position that the intentionality of language can be explained only by positing independently existing thoughts (as if Sellars denied this).
Hector-Neri Castañeda (in his correspondence with Sellars) argued that Sellars could not do justice to introspective knowledge without presupposing non-linguistic thoughts.
Ausonio Marras, in several papers: "On Sellars' Linguistic Theory of Conceptual Activity," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Reply to Sellars," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973); "Sellars on Thought and Language," Noûs 7 (1973); "Sellars' Behaviorism: A Reply to Fred Wilson," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976); "Rules, Meaning and Behavior: Reflections on Sellars' Philosophy of Language," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, ed. by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), argued that Sellars' account of thoughts was flawed by either an infinite regress or circularity. His alternative was to posit the existence of non-linguistic thoughts prior to language, concluding in one of these papers, "we have probably moved irremediably away from Sellars in countenancing pre-linguistic, symbolic or conceptual abilities." Marras, "Rules," 183.
Romane Clark argued in several papers: "Sensuous Judgments," Noûs 7 (1973); "The Sensuous Content of Perception," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, ed. H.N. Castañeda (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1975); "Sensibility and Understanding: The Given of Wilfrid Sellars," The Monist 65 (1982), that the range of our thoughts extends beyond our linguistic resources to express. Inspired by the philosophy of Everett Hall, he follows up his criticism of Sellars with a theory of "sensuous judgments" constituting a language of thought and perception.
Thomas Russman writes: "Sellars denies that there can be pre-conceptual awareness of anything," in "The Problem of the Two Images," in The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, edited by Joseph Pitt (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), 92). He repeats this charge in his A Prospectus for the Triumph of Realism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987): "Sellars assumes throughout this attack [on the given] that there is no such thing as non-conceptual (or preconceptual) perceptual awareness. (p. 8)"
Robert Ackermann comes up with the following conclusion: "It would then seem that the Jones myth underlying the internalization of speech as giving rise to thought would not be compatible with the scientific image," in "Sellars and the Scientific Image," Noûs 7 (1973), 148.
{11} Nelson Goodman, "The Emperor's New Ideas," in Language and Philosophy, ed. S. Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1969); reprinted in N. Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972), 77.
{12} Addis, L., "Natural Signs," Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983): 543-568.
{13} J.A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
{14} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{15} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1963), 160. This same passage is cited by R. Rorty as evidence for the claim that Sellars denies the existence of a pre-linguistic awareness. See his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xx. However, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182-192, Rorty notes a distinction between "awareness-as-discriminative-behavior" and "awareness as what Sellars calls being 'in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says' (p. 182)." He correctly notes that in the Sellarsian passage only the latter type of awareness is denied to pre-linguistic creatures.
{16} Sellars, "The Structure of Knowledge," 303. Since Thurston cites both (and only) Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "The Structure of Knowledge" for her interpretation, it is puzzling why she doesn't try to reconcile her interpretation with this seeming counterexample. There are also the following types of clarifying passages in Sellars:
For if one ties thinking too closely to language, the acquisition of linguistic skills by children becomes puzzling in ways which generate talk about 'innate grammatical theories'. Not all 'organized behavior' is built on linguistic structures. The most that can be claimed is that what might be called 'conceptual thinking' is essentially tied to language, and that, for obvious reasons, the central or core concept of what thinking is pertains to conceptual thinking. ( Ibid. )"
{17} Wilfrid Sellars, " Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 3-30; idem, " Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 325-345.
{19} Sellars, " Behavior,"p. 15.
{20} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336.
{22} Sellars, "Philosophy of Mind," p. 169.
{23} However, one commentator, William Rottschaefer, who had the benefit of reading Sellars' "Mental Events" and "Behavior, Language and Meaning," defended Sellars from Marras' accusation that Sellars denies the existence of pre-linguistic symbolic structures. See his "Verbal Behaviorism and Theoretical Mentalism," Philosophical Research Archives 9 (1983), 525.
{24} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior," in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook, (New York: The Dial Press, 1949), p. 301.
{25} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1967), ch. 1 and appendix.
{26} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," Science, Perception and Reality, p. 334.
{27} Wilfrid Sellars, "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process: The Carus Lectures," The Monist 64 (1981), 12.
{28} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304. {29} Charles Taylor, Explanation of Behaviour (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
{30} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 335, #55.
{31} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 120.
{32} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 336, #59. In "Truth and 'Correspondence'," he credits Hume with calling them 'natural inferences'. 218.
{34} Wilfrid Sellars, "Naming and Saying," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 226; also idem, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas, Publishers, 1967), 78.
{35} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 339.
{38} Wilfrid Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," in Science, Perception, and Reality.
{39} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 81; idem, "Meaning as Functional Classification," Synthese 27 (1974), pp. 423-4. [William Rapaport in a critical review of John Searles' Minds, Brains and Science, Noûs 22 (1988) calls an association between symbols and external objects an "external semantics"; while an association between symbols he calls "internal semantics" , 597. (AC 1996)]
{40} Ibid., 420. [The implication of this position is that beliefs are things one suffers, rather than things willed. If ethics is primarily concerned with prescribing which actions should be performed, then, in this primary concern, there cannot be an ethics of belief as propounded by R. Chisholm in his many writings. See R. Firth, "Chishom and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Review 68 (1959): pp. 493-506, and William P. Alston, "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 115-152. This does not preclude talk about an ethics of belief in some extended sense. The stress on acts rather than actions may be Sellars' inheritance from Husserl via Marvin Farber's influence, see footnote 1, ch.1. (AC 1996)]
{41} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 178. Sellars' view of volitions escapes Ryle's main criticism of "the myth of volitions." Ryle criticized a view of the will as an "action of the mind" , but clearly Sellars denies that willing is an action. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), ch. 3.
{42} Gilbert Harman, "Three Levels of Meaning," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 590-602.
{43} Sellars, "Meaning as Functional Classification," 417.
{44} Sellars, "Structure of Knowledge," 304.
{46} Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," 15.
{49} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 355.
{50} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #87.
{51} Henri-Neri Castañeda, "Rejoinders," in Knowledge and Experience, ed. C.D. Rollins (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 125.{52} Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," 330, #25.{53} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342, #89.
{54} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 319.
{55} Wilfrid Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?" Science, Perception, and Reality, 298.
{56} Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," in Essays in Philosophy and its History (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975), 437.
{57} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 298.
{60} Sellars in his own way is in agreement with Quine's challenge to the analytic-synthetic distinction as expressed in the following footnote:
That the cluster of inference by virtue of which an expression refers to a red triangle as such (or a bachelor as such) are open-textured and variable, and need only have a family resemblance from context to context, is the truth contained in Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. My central concern over the years in stressing material rule of inference has been not to deny the point Quine is making -- indeed, to a behavioristically oriented anti-Platonist, the denial would be foolish -- but rather to insist that inference patterns other than those formulated by logical truths are essential to meaning and reference. That these extra-logical inference patterns do not neatly divide into 'explicit' and 'implicit' definitions, and that they trail off into contingent generalizations, are theses that have emotional charge only for those who are still fighting the battle of the Museum. [Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), #31, 309.]
Now, in view of this analysis, I think that R. Rorty is wrong in attributing to Sellars an adherence to a kind of analytic-synthetic distinction which was criticized by Quine. And if my contention is true, then Rorty's basic premise of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that Sellars and Quine have not assimilated each other's insights collapses, at least in Sellars' case. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 171.
{61} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 176.
{64} Ibid., 200. Cf. W. Sellars, "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ...," Proceedings of the APA, 44 (1972), #71-#88.
{65} Wilfrid Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980), p. 94, #129.
{66} Hector-Neri Castañeda, "Some Reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of Intentions," in Action, Knowledge and Reality : 27-54. Bruce Aune, "Sellars on Practical Reason," in Action, Knowledge and Reality: 1-26. W. D. Solomon, "Ethical Theory," in The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Delaney, C.F., et alia, (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977): 149-188.
{68} Sellars, "On Reasoning About Values," 83.
{69} Sellars, "Language Games," p. 330, #26.
{70} Rudolph Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (Paterson: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), 180.
{72} Wilfrid Sellars, "A Semantic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," Methodos 5 (1953), 53.
{73} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 289.
{74} Ibid., 312; see also idem, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and 10 Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{75} Wilfrid Sellars, "Inference and Meaning," Mind 62 (1953), 317.
{76} Wilfrid Sellars, "Reply [to criticism of " Meaning as Functional Classification"]," Synthese 27 (1974), 457.
{77} Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 182.
{78} Leibniz, "Monadology," in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), #26; Wilfrid Sellars, "Mental Events," Philosophical Studies 39 (1981), 342.
{79} Wilfrid Sellars, "Language as Thought and as Communication," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968-1969): 506-27. Reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and its History, 96.
I am simplifying the matter by failing to distinguish as does Sellars between categorical and hypothetical rules; and between 'rules of ought-to-do' (rules of action) and 'rules of ought-to-be' (rules of criticism). But this is irrelevant to the present discussion.
{80} Wilfrid Sellars, "Phenomenalism," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 334.
{81} Sellars, "Mental Events," p. 342.
{84} Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Disposi- tions, and the Causal Modalities," 272.
{85} Arthur Burks, , "The Logic of Causal Propositions," Mind 60 (1951), 272.
{86} See Wilfrid Sellars, "On the Logic of Complex Particulars," Mind 58 (1949), pp. 317-318.
{87} Sellars, "Is There a Synthetic A Priori?," 317.
{88} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories," in Science, Perception, and Reality, 115. [It should be noted that Frege's monumental Bergiffsschrift, or Concept Writing (as it could be translated) was intended to capture those contents and structures of language which were relevant to inference. He writes: ". . . in a judgment I consider only that which influences its possible consequences. Everything necessary for a correct inference is expressed in full . . ." in Jean van Heijenoort, ed. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book In Mathematical Logic, 1979-1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 12. (AC 1996)]
{89} D. Krech and R.S. Crutchfield, Elements of Psychology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 464.
{90} John B. Carroll, Language and Thought (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 81.
{92} Peter Geach, Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), 17.
{93} Wilfrid Sellars, "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," in Philosophical Perspectives, 207.
{94} Roderick Chisholm, "Intentionality and the Mental (Sellars-Chisholm Correspondence)," 533. [William Ockham has a similar view in identifying a concept with an intention of the soul. (AC 1996)]
{96} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{97} Wilfrid Sellars, "Abstract Entities," in Philosophical Perspectives, 78.
{98} Sellars, "Language of Theories," p. 115.
{99} Wilfrid Sellars, "Conceptual Change," in Essays in Philosophy and its History, p. 176.
{102} Sellars, "The Language of Theories," 115.
{104} William S. Robinson, "The Legend of the Given," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, 89.
{106} Wilfrid Sellars, "Epistemology and the New Way of Words," The Journal of Philosophy 44 (1947), 655.
{107} See Wilfrid Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1958): 225-308.
{108} Wilfrid Sellars, "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them," Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), 296.
{109} Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Reseda, California: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1980), 129.
{110} Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 119-120.
{111} Wilfrid Sellars, "Behaviorism, Language and Meaning," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980), #126. The analysis of the determinable (sortal, generic) as a disjuction of determinables and determinates (the language of determinables and determinates is borrowed by Sellars from chapter 11 of W. E. Johnson's Logic: Part I (Cambridge University Press, 1921; Dover, 1964). The thesis is present, I believe, in the earliest writings of Sellars.
{111a} [Sellars also claims that failure to make this distinction accounts for Locke's and Berkeley's confusions about generic concepts:
As I see it, the, one element involved in the mass of confusions that is the Berkeleian theory of ideas is the confusion between an awareness of a disjunction and a disjunction of awareness . . . (Wilfrid Sellars, "Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas," in Studies in Perception, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), 301f)One only needs to take into account the fact that 'and' and 'or' are interchangeable in certain ordinary contexts to understand the confusion involved in Locke's unhappy (but diagnostic) reference to ". . . the general idea of a triangle . . . [which] must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once" ( Essay, IV, 7, 9). ( Ibid., 311) (AC 1996)]
{111b} [I think my analysis provides the key to understanding this chapter which otherwise is very obscure. I agree with Gilbert Harman's opening remarks in his review of Sellars' Science and Metaphysics :
Science and Metaphysics is a major work which deserves to be, and will be, read and reread. It is also a difficult work, particularly so in its opening chapters. The reader may wish to begin with Chapter III, saving Chapters I and II for last."(" Sellars' Semantics," Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 404.)(AC 1996)]
{112} Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, 132.
{113} L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
{114} This is probably what R. Rorty wanted to hear when he introduced the Carus lectures of Sellars by expressing an anticipation of a Hegelian synthesis.
{115} H. Brown, "Sellars, Concepts and Conceptual Change," Synthese 68 (1986), 291.